I think I'm going to be sick. This is the last thing I was expecting to hear from Bioware: a lie.

I really don't know what to say except I'm gone in 1 week. Forget it. There is no way in hell I'm going to play a 2012 MMO that has the texture quality of World of Warcraft when I saw high-res nice textures in Beta.

I'm not going to stand here and be straight-up lied to.

OK - so it wasn't my imagination. I swear I remember a really nice robe my consular had... sometimes anyway... other times the texture would glitch.... this was back in April.

Here's a post that somebody had included from the massively.joystiq page talking about this issue -- someone linked this paper which discusses what is essentially copyright-protection via remote 3d rendering. Having flipped through it a little bit, the specific details involved in "remote rendering" have caught my eye, and I'm looking at it a bit more before I hop to any conclusions.

I HIGHLY recommend everyone taking a look at that paper ... as there are some pictures that certainly scare me re: the texture issue on there... (client-side vs. server-side resolution, for example)

yikes!

Quoting Myself one last time:

Wrong Tree, wrong technique.
The assets for the game are in the TOR files, as people have already extracted them. (Look around Xentax)

What your looking at is a renderer on a network that holds the data for geometry and sends it to a client over a network to display.

What we have a Renderer Separate from the Main Game Process on the Same Machine that Renders the Display for the Game.

"THIS IS ALL CAUSED BY BIOWARE IMPLEMENTING REMOTE RENDERING AS A FORM OF COPY PROTECTION. THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCING BETWEEN THE HIGH SETTINGS DURING BETA AND THE SETTINGS AVAILABLE NOW.

Massively - what you missed is that the High Rez textures worked fine in the Beta. For release, they implemented REMOTE RENDERING. What's actually happening is that they can't handle the network traffic generated by remotely rendering higher rez textures.

Let me repeat - High Rez doesn't work because of anti-piracy DRM shenanigans, not because they're concerned about players' machines. They're remote rendering so people who have purchased the game won't be able to dig through Lucas's precious artwork for their fan sites.

Again - they're remote rendering so you can't 'steal' what you bought already. Its copy protection and they're willing to go so far as to gimp the game and lie to cover it up.

Remote rendering is the cause of all of the frame drops and slow downs as well as advanced rendering features not working, We pay big money to buy the machines that have gigantic pipes between all of our components, especially to the GPUs. Internet throughput is nowhere near the bandwidth on your motherboard."

Man I defended them on every single thing but I can't anymore. Everyone realize that Bioware has just NOW come out and said it was intentional b/c of server limitations right?? Everyone realize they are only doing that b/c the community got into such an uproar. These fools actually thought they could simply put in a small patch note saying that it was fixed and people would just accept it and move on. THEY LIED TO US and they only came out with the truth today.

Even if you want to swallow this latest junk as truth (don't know why you would as they have lied already) that only makes them look even more incompetent. I can only imagine their meetings."Hey guys this is the most hyped MMO ever, we're spending tons of cash, it's Star Wars, HEY let's use an engine and servers that can't even handle high res textures"

In short, why would you choose to use an engine that is going to give you so many problems ahead of time?? The only answers possible is that you did know and thus you're stupid, or you didn't know it would and thus incompetent. Either way it's bad.

I think I'm going to be sick. This is the last thing I was expecting to hear from Bioware: a lie.

I really don't know what to say except I'm gone in 1 week. Forget it. There is no way in hell I'm going to play a 2012 MMO that has the texture quality of World of Warcraft when I saw high-res nice textures in Beta.

I'm not going to stand here and be straight-up lied to.

Proto, I share your pain. Not to rub it in, but WoW actually has better textures. No modern MMO has texture fidelity as bad as The Blurry Republic.

It was stated in the beta forums which are now gone that they were removing high-res textures in order to cut down the amount of data the players needed to download for the final weekends of test. After a number of player voiced their concerns over the suddenly lower textures in the game they stated that the final game will look much better and not to worry.

That screenshot is from a cinematic in-game. As stated, cinematic scenes use high resolution textures because we have control over how many characters are rendered on-screen at once. This is how the game was always intended to look in cinematics. We did not 'remove' high resolution textures - they were always in the game for use in cinematics.

With that said, thank you for all of your responses. We understand everyone's desires around this issue, and although it's not going to be an overnight fix, as mentioned we're working on addressing this. Many of the suggestions you have made are similar to potential changes the development team is investigating.

I rounded up the development team once more and had another discussion, and wanted to update you with a better timeline and some more precise details on what we're doing right now.

The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement.

Other potential changes are being discussed right now – as I said, many of which are similar to changes suggested by many of you. As usual, you’ll see these sorts of changes on our Public Test Server before they make it into the live game. Right now we cannot commit to a live date for the 1.2 Game Update, but it will be within Q1 2012.

Typically these vicious, mouth foaming, swarm posts have at least 1 fanboy that breaks up every 3 negative posts with his rainbow gun. Oddly enough I don't see any of that here, very few. Guess that shows how many people are really confused with this. I know I am - I just don't get it. Real answers would be swell.

Actually,we're just playing the game now.

But please, feel free to keep whining and posting conspiracy theories. Programmers feed off of complaints and criticisms, after all, so all of these posts are totally helping to speed up the process.

I hope people realize that if it was being rendered on remote servers, over the internet, the moment you lost your internet connection, you wouldn't see anything new and would be stuck on the same, degraded, or blank, screen?

I also hope that people realize that this is not the case...

There is some contention on that theory as every time I log in since the latest patches if I have pending awards from crafting quests or even a guild MOTD if I log in at the Fleet I have an entirely black screen until I clear these UI elements.

Then the world graphics resolve in, and I do mean resolve in, I can literally watch the step up process in motion. And I'm on incredibly high end hardware here so its not an issue of my computer being unable to handle the load.

I don't think they're streaming 100% of the game but there is evidence that supports that remote asset streaming was in use as early as the 2009/2010 beta tests and I still believe that some assets are being streamed, though attempting to stream player assets of this magnitude would be phenomenally stupid.

The statements and opinions expressed on these websites are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, nor are they endorsed by Bioware, LucasArts, and its licensors do not guarantee the accuracy of, and are in no way responsible for any content on these websites.

The statements and opinions expressed on these websites are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, nor are they endorsed by Bioware, LucasArts, and its licensors do not guarantee the accuracy of, and are in no way responsible for any content on these websites.